“This taught me a lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.”
John McEnroe (1959) US tennis player
On losing to Tim Mayotte in the Ebel US Pro Indoor Championships, NY Times (February 9, 1987)
“This taught me a lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.”
John McEnroe (1959) US tennis player
On losing to Tim Mayotte in the Ebel US Pro Indoor Championships, NY Times (February 9, 1987)
“Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.”
Jodi Picoult (1966) Author
Source: Vanishing Acts
Samuel R. Delany book The Jewels of Aptor
Source: The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Chapter X (p. 133)
Context: A lesson which history should have taught us thousands of years ago was finally driven home. No man can wield absolute power over other men and still retain his own mind. For no matter how good his intentions are when he takes up the power, his alternate reason is that freedom, the freedom of other people and ultimately his own, terrifies him. Only a man afraid of freedom would want this power, who could conceive of wielding it. And that fear of freedom will turn him into a slave of this power.
Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) 22nd and 24th president of the United States
Second Inaugural Address (4 March 1893).
“It was a lesson that I would learn in time though it wasn't Hegbert who taught me.”
Nicholas Sparks book A Walk to Remember
Source: A Walk to Remember
“Themistocles said to Antiphales, "Time, young man, has taught us both a lesson."”
Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher
Life of Themistocles
“The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
"How Not To Better Social Conditions" in Review of Reviews (January 1897), p. 39 https://books.google.com/books?id=J2FAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA39 · Full text online (with at least two typos — in the last sentence of the article) as "How Not To Help Our Poor Brother" http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/trhnthopb.pdf <br class="br">1890s
“Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain.”
Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums
Source: The Dharma Bums
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
1962, Cuban Missile Crisis speech
Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)